Comparison of Colonies
New England and the Chesapeake Compared
MARY BETH NORTON
The England that the seventeenth-century migrants left behind was undergoing dramatic changes, many of which stemmed from a rapid rise in population that began early in the sixteenth century. As the population grew, the economy altered, social stratification increased, and customary modes of political behavior developed into new forms. England’s ruling elites saw chaos everywhere, and they became obsessed with the problem of maintaining order in the evidently anarchic society around them. The large-scale migration of English people to America can itself be taken as an indication of the extent of these changes, for never before in the century-old history of European expansion had more than a small number of male adventurers chosen to emigrate to the New World. Within the overall context of change new forms of familial and religious organization were especially important for women. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, Lawrence Stone has argued, patriarchal, nuclear family structures had recently become dominant, replacing an older, open-lineage system characterized by powerful lineal and collateral kin relationships. English families of the day increasingly turned inward on themselves, cutting the ties that had previously bound them to extended kin. In such nuclear households, power gravitated to the husband and father: he dominated his wife, children, and other dependents without fear of interference from kin or community. A wife was expected to defer to her husband, and he in turn expected to direct the lives of all his dependents—spouse, children, and servants alike. Reformation (and especially Puritan) theology, which was aggressively masculine in its orientation, reinforced this secular development. The rejection of Roman Catholicism included the abolition of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the removal of the convent option from women’s lives. In addition. Puritanism stressed the
MARY BETH NORTON
The England that the seventeenth-century migrants left behind was undergoing dramatic changes, many of which stemmed from a rapid rise in population that began early in the sixteenth century. As the population grew, the economy altered, social stratification increased, and customary modes of political behavior developed into new forms. England’s ruling elites saw chaos everywhere, and they became obsessed with the problem of maintaining order in the evidently anarchic society around them. The large-scale migration of English people to America can itself be taken as an indication of the extent of these changes, for never before in the century-old history of European expansion had more than a small number of male adventurers chosen to emigrate to the New World. Within the overall context of change new forms of familial and religious organization were especially important for women. In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, Lawrence Stone has argued, patriarchal, nuclear family structures had recently become dominant, replacing an older, open-lineage system characterized by powerful lineal and collateral kin relationships. English families of the day increasingly turned inward on themselves, cutting the ties that had previously bound them to extended kin. In such nuclear households, power gravitated to the husband and father: he dominated his wife, children, and other dependents without fear of interference from kin or community. A wife was expected to defer to her husband, and he in turn expected to direct the lives of all his dependents—spouse, children, and servants alike. Reformation (and especially Puritan) theology, which was aggressively masculine in its orientation, reinforced this secular development. The rejection of Roman Catholicism included the abolition of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the removal of the convent option from women’s lives. In addition. Puritanism stressed the